Every single day during the last 20 years in my career I have been confronted with the (sometimes) bitter arguments between people who manage mainframes and those who control the distributed environment. Often, the discussions were emotional, sometimes even bitter and almost always they had no positive effect on the reputation of the IT department. Call me an optimist, but I sincerely hoped that every time a new "wave" in IT occurred, it would be the reason for both sides to start working together more.

Let me explain; in companies that owned (still own) a mainframe, distributed systems were embraced as the platform that would solve all the so-called problems the mainframe had; high cost, inflexibility and complex management. History has taught us that these promises have not worked out as expected. Of course, we now do more with IT than ever before, we run different workloads, have more users, etc, but ask any businessman about the state IT in his/her company today and he/she will tell you it is too expensive, inflexible, not agile, too much money is spent on managing and not enough on innovation. Hence the enthusiasm for Cloud. Again, we believe/hope that this new technology will solve all the "problems" IT has today.

And what happens in the meantime in the data centre? There is more competition than ever. Instead of joining forces to make sure that we do not automatically move everything to a Cloud based infrastructure (which would be just as wrong as trying to move everything off the mainframe when distributed systems were introduced) IT folks argue. Instead of focusing on a fit-for-purpose data centre where things are implemented on the platform best suited to run a particular workload, we disagree on even the simplest things. We overpromise savings so workload can be "stolen" away, and then hope that by the time people realize these savings cannot be achieved, the project can no longer be stopped.

Even the threat that it is easier to move distributed workloads to a Cloud infrastructure than it is to move mainframe workload to Cloud doesn't seem to motivate people to start working together in order to make the data centre more cost effective, efficient and integrated. Management tools that manage workload across platforms are seen as tools from the dark side. X-platform Application Performance Management solutions don't get used to bring mainframe and distributed closer together and the question "who owns Linux on the mainframe" seems to be more important than asking what it can do for the business.

It often it takes a "common enemy" to make people realize that they need to join forces. Calling Cloud an "enemy" is not correct, I realize that. Cloud IS happening for all the right reasons and has great advantages for certain types of applications and workloads. But only if we team up can we help prevent our companies from making the mistake many of us made years ago - and that is using a new platform for "everything", just because they can.

Oh, and yes, please forward this article to your distributed colleagues....